by Jonathan Reisman

Hannah Pingree was appointed by Governor Mills as the Director of Maine’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future and as the co-chair of the climate council. She is a former Speaker of the Maine House and the daughter of longtime 1st District Congresswoman Chellie Pingree. Hannah is the Governor’s right-hand woman on policy and planning and is on the short list of potential Democratic gubernatorial and/or senatorial nominees. She is also one of Maine’s most visible climate alarmists.

Over recent years, climate alarmists have successfully linked extreme weather and climate change. Hannah is a leader in this regard, frequently intimating that recent winter storm damage is attributable to climate change. She will be speaking at the Maine Municipal Association annual convention in October on precisely that topic. Unfortunately, she will be spreading misinformation.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) looks at multi-decadal weather data to determine with various levels of confidence whether:

• there is a detectable trend (Detection) and 

• that trend can be attributed to anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gas emissions (Attribution).

The IPCC had high/medium confidence that human-caused climate change was increasing heat waves, heavy precipitation, ecological drought, agricultural drought, and fire weather. There was low/no confidence that any increase in flooding, meteorological drought, hydrological drought, tropical cyclones (including hurricanes), winter storms (attention Hannah), thunderstorms, tornadoes, lightning, hail, and extreme winds could either be detected and/or attributed to humans. The attached table is from the work of climate scientist Roger Pielke. I have included links to some of his work.

On Aug 18th, I sent the following e-mail to Hannah:

Dear Director Pingree-

I am writing to you to protest your continued climate alarmism and your advocacy of a link between extreme weather and climate change. There is little or no evidence to support such a claim and quite a bit, including from the IPCC, debunking it.  Carbon Dioxide does not cause bad weather. As Director of Maine’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future and co-chair of the climate council, you should not be spreading climate misinformation or worse, basing policy and resource allocation decisions on it.

Climate alarmist policies to replace fossil fuels with intermittent solar and wind, magic unicorn batteries, and transmission lines and cables across both rural and offshore Maine are all costly with no averted global warming benefit. You are driving electric rates towards $.40/kWh and destabilizing the grid with no averted climate change benefit whatsoever.  

I understand that in the deep blue waters of the 1st Congressional District and the greater Augusta area, non-climate alarmist voices (often called “deniers” but I prefer “realists”) may be hard to find. I suggest you try Roger Pielke, Bjorn Lomborg, and the work of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of the think tanks Governor Mills and other Democratic State Attorney Generals subpoenaed for opposing climate alarmism. As a Mainer concerned about the sustainability of freedom and prosperity in the face of climate alarmist policies that are all cost and no benefit, I would be glad to help.

Regards

Jon Reisman

Associate Professor of Economics & Public Policy Emeritus

University of Maine at Machias

Statler and Waldorf Intern

I haven’t gotten a response, and I guess I don’t expect one as long as political science, ambition, alarmism, and equity (whatever that is) govern climate change policy as opposed to physical science, evidence/data, and efficiency (whatever that is). How else to explain misinformation-based adoption of freedom and prosperity destroying energy policies that avert no global warming whatsoever?

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/how-to-understand-the-new-ipcc-repo...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrZTWHCA5L4

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/what-the-ipcc-actually-says-about